The facilitation of word production in Aphasia: what can it do for the clinician?

Finding the best approach to remedy the word finding problems that people with aphasia often have has been a vexed question. The last 30 years has seen the emergence of investigations using facilitation, the once only application of a treatment, as a tool, within a cognitive neuropsychology framework. Here, we provide an overview of some major contributions to this growing body of evidence and a discussion on applying it in clinical practice. We introduce readers to a current project that seeks to answer some important questions that have emerged over the years. These questions include whether the effects of facilitation are robust over time, whether different types of facilitation tasks differ in effectiveness, the relationship between level of impairment and type of facilitation and, whether facilitation can help choose the best treatment for this often-intractable problem.